Digital Projects

Mary Shelley’s Gothic Tales in The Keepsake: A Digital Edition This is a digital edition of six Gothic tales that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published in the literary annual The Keepsake in the 1820s and 1830s. I digitized the tales in issues of The Keepsake held in the University of Victoria’s Special Collections and added metadata and downloadable .txt files for each tale, along with the fiction, poetry, and engravings published alongside them.

Gothic Colours, with Eleanor StriblingWhat colours are evoked in Gothic novels? We used Python and natural language processing to analyze the use of words evoking colour in a corpus of as many nineteenth-century Gothic novels as we could find in Project Gutenberg and other sources. The first iteration of the site is live, and we are planning to update and expand it. We presented a talk about this project at PyCon 2017, and a video of the talk is available on the conference’s YouTube channel. Our text corpus and code is available on Github.

Linked Modernisms OntologyAs part of Stephen Ross’s Linked Modernisms project, Jana Millar Usiskin, Christine Walde and I built a dynamic ontology to structure the metadata in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The ontology—which we call Casaubon after the character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch—can be downloaded, used, and adapted for other projects related to other cultural domains.